Paramount goes HD DVD

So does DreamWorks. The decision to bypass the more popular Blu-ray format came as a surprise among the folks who follow this stuff, and it certainly shakes up the ongoing battle of the formats (for the uninitiated, HD DVD and Blu-ray players produce much sharper pictures than conventional DVD players). Up to now, Paramount and DreamWorks, along with Warner Brothers, had been using both formats. Universal Pictures releases films exclusively in HD DVD, while Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Co., Lions Gate and MGM release titles only in the Sony Corp.-developed Blu-ray. In other words, it’s a real mess. From Variety:

Paramount marketing topper Rob Moore cited HD DVD's price advantage on Toshiba-manufactured stand-alone set-tops -- which retail now for about $250 on the low end, which is several hundred dollars cheaper than Blu-ray -- as a key advantage. Currently, there are more people who own Blu-ray players, he acknowledged, since the devices are built into PlayStation 3 game consoles. However, it's consumers with set-top devices that Par covets. "When we looked at the data so far, buy rates for people who have bought stand-alone players is much higher than when someone buys a player embedded in a game system," Moore says.